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DISCLAIMER: I work for Joyent, and I can speak for the company but this is not legal advice. My personal understanding of trademark law is that it is within a
by sh1mmer 15y ago
DISCLAIMER: I work for Joyent, and I can speak for the company but this is not legal advice.
My personal understanding of trademark law is that it is within a given domain. If you use "Node" in place of "Node.js" but are clearly talking about "Node.js" then you might be infringing on the trademark.
However, it is not our intention to stop anyone from doing open source or business using Node. We'd love to give you a free license to use the mark, please email "trademark [at] joyent [dot] com".
Our intention here is to make sure there are some protections against bad sports. People doing good legitimate work with Node is awesome and we want to encourage that. Mostly we need to do this thing with lawyer so if some hypothetical organisation in the future tried to do something bad and call it Node.js we can stop them. We don't want people to misrepresent a product as Node.js when it isn't, and damage the good name of the Node community.
trademark [at] joyent [dot] com is the best place for questions but you are welcome to reach out to me directly too. I'm tom [at] joyent [dot] com or @sh1mmer on Twitter.
- dchest 15y agoThanks for your response. I have no doubts that Joyent have good intentions. I'm not a member of Node.js community, so don't take this as me personally (or my company) having an issue with Joyent trademarking the name. I understand that creating a company with the name "Node Consulting, Inc." that provides Node.js consulting services may create confusion. But why forbid the use of term in the domain name without agreement? For example, Python's trademark policy (http://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/ http://www.python.org/psf/trademarks/) says that you can't name your company "The Python Company", but they have nothing here about domains. I have read http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Trademark:_Domain_Names http://ilt.eff.org/index.php/Trademark:_Domain_Names and the situation about trademarks and domain names is not clear... Also, why didn't Joyent register "Node" trademark as well?
- carson 15y agoTo your last question, they did: http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=85262599 http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=8...